A letter written to our future President from Michael Pollan concerning Food Policy. Find it here. Very interesting. I, for one, would love to hear where the candidates stand on Food Policy.
Check it out.
What are your thoughts on food policy and the governments involvement in the food we eat?
2 comments:
Thanks for the link! I would totally vote for Pollan. I'm reading Omnivore's Dilemma right now, and while he loses me at times, what most impresses me is the way he exhaustively examines his subject from all sides. A nation's food policy is such a foundational, consequential issue, but it seems that our politicians want to ignore it. Too much money to be lost, I suspect.
I think our food supply in America is one of the most awful things about our country.
With the advent of mass-production, we have implemented all kinds of treatments for food which kill most or all of the nutritional value of the food, at the sake of preserving it longer, so more can be sold.
Required pasteurization, for instance, is important if your milk is being milked and packaged in huge factories where it is nearly impossible to regulate the possible contaminants to the milk. When produced by a small farm that actually has the ability to raise their cattle well and closely monitor the milking and bottling process, it's much less likely to run into problems with un-pasteurized milk.
Also, when your milk has to be transported by truck from Texas to Oregon, pasteurization is important to lengthen the shelf life long enough that it will actually make it to Oregon with more than a day of shelf life left. The problem is, it kills off all the beneficial bacteria in the milk as well, and homogenization changes the chemical makeup of the milk and makes the fats and vitamins in the milk less easily digestible.
Much of our meat and produce is irradiated to kill micro-organisms (again because they are produced en-masse and can't be regulated as closely, and to improve shelf life for long distance transport), but again, is at high enough levels that it is likely to effect the chemical makeup of the food, and again, eliminates potentially beneficial micro-organisms as well as harmful ones.
Not to mention all the garbage that gets fed to and injected into the livestock we eat, put on the plants we eat, etc.
I think this has been one of, if not the biggest factor (the main other being our automobile dependence) that has destroyed the health of the American population.
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